New York’s junior US senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, went on late-night television this week to declare that, in these turbulent times, what America really needs is a young mom in the White House.

That would be her, of course.

“I’m going to run for president of the United States because as a young mom I am going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own,’’ she told Stephen Colbert.

Gillibrand is 52, a couple of decades out of the young-mom demographic, but what the hell — if her focus groups tell her America yearns to replace President Trump with Kristen Bell, she should go for it.

Trump Replacement Syndrome is pandemic in the Democratic Party, of course, which accounts for the gaggle of no-name zephyrs lining up to take a piece out of the president. And everybody needs a niche.

Where America’s Young Mom will settle out in the scrum isn’t clear. But her morning-line numbers — she’s ­invisible in the polls — suggest she is looking at a very heavy lift. Not many voters have heard of Gillibrand, and she isn’t a candidate who is likely to prosper from wider ­exposure.

A mirthlessly smiling opportunist, to put it gently, Gillibrand’s record inspires little ­enthusiasm even among left-wingers. Plus, her roots run deep into one of the most corrupt cultures in America’s political history — the colorful, ­albeit now mostly defunct, ­Albany County Democratic ­machine.

I covered the organization as a reporter and editor at the Capital District’s principal newspaper for 15 years; I came to know, and occasionally to admire, the men — and one woman very relevant to this discussion — who ran it.

Endlessly fascinating as they were — especially its leaders, party boss Daniel P. O’Connell and Albany’s 42-year mayor, ­Erastus Corning II — they took full advantage of state government’s proximity and its deep pockets; the looting was usually low-key but always relentless, and everybody prospered but the taxpayer.

see also

Corning and Dorothea Noonan — Gillibrand’s grandmother — openly maintained a decades-long political and (very) personal relationship. It was even the subject of an ­unlikely off-Broadway play, no doubt inspired in part by the senator’s political potential.

Certainly the arrangement, among other things, paved the way to a fruitful lobbying career for Gillibrand’s father, Albany fixer-lawyer Douglas Rutnik.

And that was no impediment to Gillibrand’s career, either — as Democrat Rutnik and Republican powerhouse-cum-fellow fixer Alfonse D’Amato conspired to persuade former Gov. David Paterson to appoint the then-congresswoman to the Senate when Hillary Clinton ­resigned the seat in 2009.

And that is how America’s Young Mom got to where she is today.

Not that she didn’t help herself along the way. She has shown dazzling dexterity adapting previous principles to new opportunities — for example, converting a National Rifle Association “A” rating earned while representing a moderate upstate congressional district to total NRA disapprobation when she broadened her constituency.

Her perceived needs have flipped her like a flapjack on other ­issues, too: Once a big fan of Wall Street (and its reservoirs of campaign cash), Gillibrand now wants to tax it to death, a favored hard-left theme. In other words, she’s fluent in Berniespeak.

While this is by no means in the best ­interest of New Yorkers, it clearly reflects what many people consider to be a character flaw: She fibs a lot.

It was a scant 83 days before she ­announced her bid for the presidency that Gillibrand promised without qualification or equivocation that if New Yorkers re-elected her to the Senate, the Senate was where she would stay.

“I will serve my six-year term,” she ­declared during a TV debate. Ahem, not so much.

Now as politicking goes, this was no mortal sin; candidates who don’t dissemble usually die by the roadside — and in the ­Albany County Democratic ­machine tradition, deceit was a way of life.

But, along with everything else, such double-dealing does hint at the damage a competent opposition-research team would do — in the unlikely event that America’s Young Mom catches some electoral traction.